Kristen
Iskandrian
Friendship, A Semiotics
I have some
friends with whom we
discuss our parents. We
say that our mothers are unhappy or overbearing, and that our
fathers are infuriatingly punctual or unkind to our mothers. From
these assessments, we make evaluations about ourselves, about our
own unhappiness or jealousies or obsessions, our own inabilities to
love and be loved. We don’t, as a rule, connect what we might
consider to be our good traits to our parents. After I leave these
particular friends I feel vaguely angry with my parents, but also
guilty for criticizing them, and subjecting them to the scrutiny of
people they do not know. I also feel that I have better parents than
my friends, and an outlook on
things that is generally less bleak and more promising than I
would have thought if I did not have these friends.
I have other
friends whose parents I
know nothing about, and who know nothing of my parents. With these
friends, I go to restaurants.
If a new restaurant opens, I will meet these friends there, and we
will talk about the menu and the décor and the demeanor of the
servers. We will order drinks, and then discuss the drinks, and pass
them around to one another to try. We will order appetizers, and
discuss them, and entrees, and discuss them, and lastly dessert,
which we will also discuss. We will scrape our forks and spoons
against one another’s plates and say things like, I wish I had
gotten that, or, too salty. When we are not talking about the food,
we will make polite inquiries into the
least personal aspects of our
personal lives. But mostly, we will talk about the experience of
being in the restaurant, and when the bill comes, we will argue over
who will pay, and make
promises that next time, we will pay.
There is one
friend whom I don’t look
in the eye, and who does not
look me in the eye.
We are close, save for this fact, which makes me think we are not
close at all, but dishonest with each other, and unable to encounter
one another on an intimate level because of certain deep fears. We
see one another frequently, and talk of many things, and yet I’m
fairly sure that we make each other uncomfortable. Still, we insist
on spending time together, as if to prove that the opposite is true.
Around some
friends, I feel the
presence of something sexual.
It’s contained, and pretty much in the background, but there
nonetheless. At times I have had dreams about friends I’d never been
even remotely attracted to, but in the dream we were together in a
hazily sexual way, and since then, I find myself regarding these
friends differently, with an offhand, detached kind of lust that is
more idea than longing. I have the sense that each of these few
friends have had the same dream featuring me in the role that they
played in my dream. It is as though we, as a small ruling body, have
vetoed sex with one another in favor of latent sexual feelings that
make us laugh hard at one another’s jokes and compliment one
another’s hair: the harder we press the feelings down, the harder we
get along.
I notice that every group of
friends has its own
culture, its own customs
and language, and I find myself therefore traveling from one little
country to the next, fluency wondrously restored to me the moment I
disembark. In some places, we speak entirely in
metaphor.
The thing is never the thing
that it is, but a different thing that makes its antecedent, its
denotatum, more totemic. Or, we say the things that are next to
the things we really want to
say, thereby creating two conversations, one that runs between
us and another that runs amok in our heads like a shiny pinball,
ricocheting noisily off of the first conversation and clamoring at
us for days.
I have
friends who like to talk about
politics, and whose
politics they assume I share. They assume this because I neither
disagree nor agree with them, but make reassuring noises and
affable facial
expressions as they speak.
Among two or three
friends, I feel confined
to my adolescence. We
meet in memory, at the
bleachers or in homeroom or at the prom or in the basement of
someone’s house, and we talk about what we see. Around one another,
we are very careful to remain as close to whom we were as possible.
Again and again
we reveal the same things,
using slightly different words each time. Very little is said about
anything current; we are experts of all the past tenses and can make
fun of ourselves skillfully. If we are married, we talk about our
marriages as extensions or foils of relationships we all remember.
If we are divorced, we talk about closure the way we did after we
first learned the word. These friends know my first favorite foods
and details about my body during its tenderest times.
I have
friends I have never met, people I know strictly through
e-mail correspondence. We
sign off “Best” or “Cordially” or sometimes just our names or
initials. We do not make inquiries about family or hobbies. One time
I wrote “I hope you and your family have a happy holiday” because it
was December and because I was reasonably sure that this person had
some kind of family. But generally, we are specific and
task-oriented in our
communication.
I don’t feel as though I have many friends, but
when I really think about it, I see that I do, where I define
“friend” liberally and
exhaustively. But I am not a person who particularly likes having
friends. I don’t like the telephone, and I don’t, in general, like
making plans, and since talking on the phone and setting up
opportunities to meet in person and then actually meeting in person
seem to be important practices for sustaining friendships, I find
myself at odds
with the very nature of the
enterprise. I become
nervous before I attend social situations, and check my hair and
clothing many times in the bathroom before entering. I still feel
the way I felt when I was quite young and quite alone on the
playground, because of my glasses, and how my hair looked, and
because I did not have the courage to perform daring feats on the
swings. And yet, here I am, in relatively secure possession of many
friendships and many kinds of friendship.
Here I pause to reflect on the
legitimacy of friends,
the requirements.
The earliest
friendships are based on
proximity (neighborhood
friends, friends from school) and
shared experiences (same
bus stop, riding bikes). This doesn’t totally change. Bus stops
become workplaces and riding bikes becomes cycling or writing poetry
or knitting or going to business school. Often, I choose friends who
remind me of myself, or I am chosen by friends for the same reason,
or I become mixed up with “mutual” friends where the choosing
becomes a matter of compliance. Then there is always a friend who
has nothing to do with me, whose interests don’t intersect with mine
and whose weltanschauung
is decidedly different. Under the influence of such a friend I have
behaved in ways I would not have otherwise. I have stolen candy. I
have put wet, wadded up things in mailboxes. I have bought
astoundingly expensive shoes and blacked out from drunkenness.
From a young age I understood that there were
always things a person wanted to hear in the pauses of their
speaking or storytelling. I became adept at
filling those pauses with
the desired responses, and as a result, over time, I have gained
many friends. I
understand now that they are not admiring me; they are admiring
themselves in the mirror
I provide. When I was twenty-five I left the man I’d been in love
with, telling friends—the friends I talked to about
relationships—that he was not right for me. What I meant of course
was that he was not me;
he did not act how I would act or say what I would say or deliver
the coveted reactions when I told him things. For two dark years I
contemplated the implications of this. I allowed myself to be set up
with people, and went on dates with them in an almost catatonic
state of politeness. I
worried about what would happen if I stopped being polite and
started expecting things of them and found them unable to perform
those things. My worry made me very popular with men. They wanted
second dates, and third. My friends, the ones who engineered the
first dates, reported that the men found me charming, fascinating,
beautiful even. Which confirmed my fear that love was an ignoble
trick based on pretense
and the delicate calibration and tireless negotiation of the
ego.
But this was a conclusion arrived at in my late
twenties, and as such, unreliable. I have since stopped forcing love
to be one thing, and I have become humbler and more reverent toward
it. I stand somewhere in the narthex, looking out over its pews and
stained glass and impossibly ornate chandeliers, and I don’t snort
at the heavy grandeur as I would have once. I feel instead sort of
dazed, but happy enough to be a witness, to be just inside. And then
I go home and I catalogue my
friends, and see my own needs and the needs of each one very
plainly, and I feel no guilt or confusion about how these needs,
across friendships, are met. Each friendship is a
synecdoche of friendship,
and all friendships are the products of
communication and desire.
Communication and desire are made up of so many parts, and instead
of looking at those parts, I look at the people who render them for
me, and based on this rendering, I determine whom I choose as
friends, and why. This much is clear to me, and the clarity is a
comfort. But beneath the comfort buzz
unpleasant questions
reminiscent of the late-night, booze-soaked, cigarette-studded
revelations of my late twenties: is a friend only a friend insofar
as she or he adequately performs a certain part of a social
equation? Does the friend
matter at all, or only the
words of the friend, and very occasionally, the actions? And
aren’t words really only words, and even less than words, since they
are received as sounds
that purport to mean things, but
fail, since a word can
only be the sound of the word, or the sight of it, but never the
thing itself, and the thing itself is only definable with words,
which puts us in the miserable spin-cycle of the world’s most
symbolic washing machine? Couldn’t the specific
friend, in fact, be
anybody, anybody at all
who sensed the need, and filled it? Do I have friends, or only
prismatic projections of myself, echoing meaningless sounds? And
does this possibility make me more alone than if I had no friends at
all? Because if I had none, I would be
alone but somehow more
accountable?
Kristen
Iskandrian